Administrators in enterprise environments typically push or provide enterprise-related information or content to the users. For example, an administrator may push content specific to users belonging to a particular employment group based on their employment status/titles. A similar example applies to employees in a finance group where the administrator may be inclined to push content or information relating to the company's finances to the portals of those employees. On the other hand, the administrators may also restrict and limit content to certain users, such as limiting network usage or network status to information technology support staff.
Alternatively or in addition, administrators provide the users with personalization options (i.e., configuring the portals based on each user's preferences). For example, enterprise computer network environments sometimes provide portals to enterprise users to access internal information easier and faster. Such portals also permit each individual user to generate a unique user experience that is customized to the user's preferences. In other words, either the administrator will personalize a small portion of the homepage of the portal on behalf of the user or, as with internet portals, the user is allowed to create their own version of the portal's home page. As a specific example, a portal may be a page with a collection of information types, such as hyperlinks to text or multimedia content, text or multimedia content, or services (e.g., web-based e-mail accounts) designed to guide the user to various information that he or she finds personally interesting. In such an example, the user typically configures the portal to include a variety of content, such as news sources, sports news, hobby types, location-specific weather forecasts, and the like. In addition, the user may also change the layout of the portal, such as color, font types, font sizes, and placements of the selected content.
While the portals can provide personalized content in addition to the enterprise-related content, administrators are often more eager to prioritize the availability of the latter content to users therefore limiting the space and availability of personalized content. Such practice is implemented because the enterprise-related content has a higher priority. As such, given a limited space within a page, users are left with a congested space overloaded with pushed enterprise information on the portal, which makes the portal less personal. In addition, a user is often forced to view enterprise content that may be irrelevant to the user personally even though the content is relevant to other members of a group to which he or she belongs.